House on Fire.

And, of course, I'm trapped inside.

Dear Permission to be Powerful Reader,

I burned my life to the ground.

Again.

Let’s review…

The past two years have been the hardest of my life.

Two straight years of nuclear winter.🥶

It started when Tony Robbins fired me.

I had no income…

And yet, I refused to go back to freelancing.

If I were going to pull this off, I would have to draw on every insight I’d earned over fifteen years writing for the best in the business.

Everything.

Keep in mind:

I was a new immigrant.
Freshly divorced.
Alone.

Not even an “in case of emergency” contact.

The buck stopped here.

No safety net.

And I was a freelance copywriter in the middle of the AI apocalypse.

There was nothing to go back to.

So I locked myself in a room for a year.

And built something that still humbles me.

An email list of 93,000 subscribers.

From scratch.

While waiting to find out if the U.S. government would deport me.

I was agitated as fuck.

ICE was in the headlines.

Kicking in doors.

I felt like a fugitive.

Because of a little bit of paperwork.

I’m from St. Lucia.

A small island.

I got my green card in 2021.

Divorced in 2022.

That timing is not ideal.

At one point my mindset was simple:

I don’t care if I’m homeless
as long as I’m homeless on U.S. soil.

There’s a strange power in having nothing left to lose.

When annihilation seems certain…

You stop pulling your punches.

You abandon every ounce of restraint…

I understood what this mission required.

I would have to be willing to go broke.

Willing to lose everything.

Because the thing I was building was going to demand everything.

I pushed myself to the edge of sanity.

Night and day, I thought about one thing:

Growing my list.

I was done selling my talent to someone else’s empire.

Done waiting for loyalty from people who never believed it went both ways.

Fifteen years working behind the scenes.

This time, I would step into the light.

To build this, I used every skill I’d acquired.

When the money ran out, I became a janitor at a Zen Center.

I meditate for hours a day.

It’s a strange thing to scrub toilets in the morning
and write to tens of thousands of people at night.

Some people here don’t understand it.

One of them thinks I’m lying about the size of my audience.

Everything I own is in storage.

Every emergency fund is gone.

Most of it went into building this list.

Ninety-five percent of that money went into trial and error.

Learning the hard way.

I can’t tell you how hard it is to willingly spend everything you have on hope.

My mind wants closure.

I miss being a freewheeling dancer.

And I have scrubbed more toilets than I care to do ever again.

I’m down to my last few thousand dollars.

Closer to the flames than I feel comfortable.

The house is on fire.

I’m still inside.

But there’s hope.

I have leverage.

For the first time in my career.

I set the terms.

I own the infrastructure.

I’m speaking without a client’s approval.

No borrowed voice.

No pretending to be someone else.

No asking for permission.

And I can feel the difference.

I’ve finally begun monetizing it.

I launched a Patreon called The Vacation Vault.

I have 35 paid subscribers.

1000 pays for the lifestyle I want.

I am close to securing my first paid advertiser - a former client, no less.

For now, this is what matters:

I built something no one can fire me from.

To do it, I had to evolve.

From copywriter
to founder.

Now the risk is mine.

So is the upside.

Tony
Editor-in-Chief
Permission to be Powerful